Just another earth shatteringly geeky story I ran across today. A new prototype robot developed by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University can transition from floors to walls, and even ceilings without damaging surfaces, and without falling. Technology Review reports...
Researchers have created a robot that can run up a wall as smooth as glass and onto the ceiling at a rate of six centimeters a second. The robot currently uses a dry elastomer adhesive, but the research group is testing a new geckolike, ultrasticky fiber on its feet that should make it up to five times stickier.
It's not the first robot to use fiberlike dry adhesives to stick to surfaces, says Metin Sitti, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, who led the research at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), in Pittsburgh. But this robot should prove to have far greater sticking power, thanks to fibers that are twice as adhesive as those used by geckos.
It's been a crazy day on the web. After bowing to perceived pressure from the AACS Licensing Authority and removing bookmark's, Digg finally threw in the towel. Digg users went on a massive revolt posting link after link after link to all sorts of creative ways of displaying the dreaded HD-DVD "Processing Key" that's not exactly been a secret. 09 f9 11...I dunno, even "867-5309 Jenny" is better lyrics, but I ran across a guy *singing* the processing key lol!
This should be proof positive as to how useless, pointless, unenforcable, and a bad idea laws like the DMCA are. The Inquirer Reports...
THE MPAA is having a go at erasing the fairly public HD-DVD processing key number from the Interweb.
The key, Hex 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0, was
discovered months ago and has been distributed amongst netzines
everywhere.
However stories where the key is mentioned have been attracting the
attention of MPAA spooks. DMCA take down notices have been issued to
sites like Spooky Action at a Distance and Digg.
It looks like the Motion Picture Association of America are flexing their muscle and using one of the vaguest and most specious laws ever written, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), to take down not only blogs posting discovered "processing keys", but also to take down referrals from site's like Digg to articles discussing the issues.
Valid assertion of legal rights, or censorship under the thin veil of law? Slashdot reports...
Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?"
We ran across this interview/story today and felt compelled to repost it. A French physician and ardent linux support is the ONE MAN you can all thank for adding support for 253 webcam's in Linux. The Open Source OS world may still be a bit of a mess when competing with the ease of Windows, but efforts like this make you wonder. One man with drive, tenacity, and no funding does what noone else can do. And none of the major linux distributions back this guy's efforts, even the big players dipping into the corporate worlds coffers. The Inquirer reports....
A LONE HOBBYIST programmer sitting at his home in France is responsible for adding 253 USB webcams to the list of those supported by Linux. He tells the INQUIRER about this often unknown and unrecognised achievement.
Near three years ago, I purchased the cheapest USB webcams -actually, one pair- I could find at the time, without taking into consideration whether those webcams worked with Linux or not. I ran one desktop PC with Win2K and one of the webcams was plugged to that box. I quickly found out several things: first, "Made in China" webcams surely are cheap, but that comes at a price of often having no support web site, no physical address of the manufacturer, and no updates to its drivers.
When you think Sony, you tend to think "hip", "hi-tech",
"entertainment". At least that's what Sony would want you to think.
Well, obviously someone at Sony's marketing department had a severe
psychotic episode and forgot to take his or her meds.
In the official Playstation Magazine, they had a feature on the release
of Gods Of War II for the PS2, and featured images of the launch event
in Greece. Images that show a slaughtered goat dripping blood from it's
partially attached head and neck. People attending the event were
invited to eat offal out of the animal's carcass. Now Gods Of War II is
an obviously violent title, but who in their right mind would push a
console game with a slaughtered goat? Probably a now-ex employee of
Sony. The Daily Mail reports...
Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat’s still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.
Sickening images of the party have appeared in the company’s official PlayStation magazine – but after being contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Sony issued an apology for the gruesome stunt and promised to recall the entire print run.
Critics condemned the entertainment giant, which produces scores of Hollywood blockbusters each year, for its "blood lust" and said the grotesque "sacrifice" highlighted increasing concerns over the content of video games and the lengths to which the industry will go to exploit youngsters.
We recently reviewed the Kodak Easyshare 5300 ourselves, and were duly impressed with the overall package and Kodak's intentions to shift the paradigm in the printer industry business model. HP began reacting to the imminent release of Kodak's printer in the fall of last year with new pricing/bundling deals on ink and paper...but only for certain high margin printers. HP just the other day released yet another press release further committing to lowering overall supply costs. Ain't competition grand? The Wall Street Journal took this printer around the block too, and they felt about as we did. The WSJ Reports...
Kodak's main weapon in this new war is cheaper ink. Traditionally, H-P and other makers have sold the printers for relatively little, then made most or all of their money on the ink cartridges.So, Kodak decided to reverse that business model. Its three new printers start at $149.99, not sub-$100 bargain prices. But its black ink cartridges cost just $9.99, and the color ones -- which combine five color inks -- just $14.99. And these are standard-capacity cartridges, not small or starter versions. Comparable H-P cartridges vary in price, but can easily cost double that, or more.
And we thought *we* were busy. Stephane, over at MatBe.com, a popular french tech review site takes the plunge into an utterly MASSIVE roundup of 105 Power Supplies. If you are the type that wants all your "goodie" in one big helping, you might want to check this one out. Apologies for the translation. Google can only do so much.
Since the end of 2005, we use the same configuration for our tests of PSU's. Although newcomer to badly consume not Watts, it is sometimes
insufficient for certain very powerful food while being too greedy for
the most modest blocks. In short, when you read these lines, this
configuration will have left to the retirement after good and faithful
services and will make place with a new protocol of test. But before
dismounting it, we decided to offer a lap of honour to him by
subjecting a few additional blocks to him. All had left the idea to
make an update of comparative of 26 supplies appeared December 2005.
However, the reputation of Matbe.com as regards tests of food having
made its way, the manufacturers did not haggle over the parcels that
they sent to us for this update. With final, here us are with
comparative of 105 PSU's...
A research team at The University of Texas at Austin, has just recently shown a prototype for a radical new general purpose computer processor architecture, which apparently has the potential to perform at the trillions of calculations per second level. Known as the TRIPS chip (Tera-op, Reliable, Intelligently adaptive Processing System), they indicate each of the two cores running at a measly 500mhz (on a 130nm process developed through a partnership with IBM) can generate a peak performance of 500 gigaflops! Sweet stuff! And it's good to see that processor development isn't a dead science. Scienceblog reports...
Professors Stephen Keckler, Doug Burger and Kathryn McKinley have been working on underlying technology that culminated in the TRIPS prototype for the past seven years. Their research team designed and built the hardware prototype chips and the software that runs on the chips.
"The TRIPS prototype is the first on a roadmap that will lead to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies," said Burger, associate professor of computer sciences.
TRIPS is a demonstration of a new class of processing architectures called Explicit Data Graph Execution (EDGE). Unlike conventional architectures that process one instruction at a time, EDGE can process large blocks of information all at once and more efficiently.
Today is Earth Day, a day where we are supposed to celebrate progress made in protecting our environment and conserving energy. Don't feel you can make any impact? How about tuning up your PC's power management system, so that your PC is appropriately "green". We ran across this article on eXoid.com on utilizing S3 Standby Mode power management without sacrificing usability. Well worth a read, and a simple geeky way you can participate in Earth Day....
Because of increasing awareness in the general public about energy conservation, the ability to utilize low power states on desktop PCs is incredibly underdocumented and widely unused. My goal with this article is to change all that, to help computer users everywhere utilize these low power states without losing any original functionality of their network drives or remote applications. Heck, if you follow this guide, you may even be able to save a buck or two in the process.
